The philosopher David Abram observes that “the body is itself a kind of place—not a solid object but a terrain through which things pass, and in which they sometimes settle and sediment.”

Inflammation is a biological, social, economic, and ecological pathway, all of which intersect, and whose contours were made by the modern world.

Typically in septic shock, a person’s body sets off intense inflammation in response to an infection or trauma. Body temperature spikes to a fever to fight the offender. It can then plunge into hypothermia as the body fails to correct the

Acute inflammation can begin with an infection, when innate immune cells recognize molecular signatures found on the surface of bacteria, fungi, or viruses called pathogen-associated

colonialism isn’t simply the physical occupation of land. It is a process, an operation of power in which one cosmology is extinguished and replaced with another. In

that determine whether aging cells will become drivers of chronic systemic inflammation.18

The sum of lifetime exposures to nongenetic drivers of health and illness, from conception to death, is called the exposome.17 The exposome encompasses chemical, social, psychological, ecological, historical, political, and biological elements

Our anatomical systems are embedded in more systems—ones that humans have engineered and that make up our surrounding ecologies.

Colonialism has fundamentally altered our relationships with the web of life, and we are all living with its consequences. When Europe began its pillage of the Western Hemisphere in 1492, Indigenous cosmologies of reciprocity, relationships with and duties of care for water, land, and living beings were uprooted, replaced with a worldview animated